Succeeding with SOA: Realizing Business Value Through Total Architecture

"Like so many acronyms in public currency, SOA means many different things to different people. Paul Brown deftly avoids getting caught in the trap of overstating the case for SOA. Instead, he brings the topic skillfully into focus, zeroing in on the concepts that must be understood in order to be effective. Paul's purpose, as I've found so often in his presentations and conversations, is to get to the core of real-world architectural issues that make the difference between success and failure. Paul doesn't sit in an ivory tower pontificating; he gets right down to the critical issues in order to develop effective real-life strategies."

--From the Foreword by Jonathan Mack, Senior Technical Architect, Guardian Life Insurance Company

"As Paul Brown explains in this fine book, there is more to software development than just writing code. Successful software requires deep thought and strategy. It requires the coordination and marshalling of the resources and intellect of the entire company, both business and IT. I learned much from reading his manuscript and heartily endorse the finished book."

--Dr. Michael Blaha, author and industrial consultant

"Paul Brown has provided a practical and actionable guide that will illuminate the way for Business and IT Leaders involved in IT strategy, planning, architecture, and project management. A successful adoption of SOA will touch every aspect of the business and change the way IT does business. This book does a good job of describing the organizational challenges and risks and providing suggestions to manage them. It also dives deeply into the architectural techniques that can be employed in order to align the service architecture with the business, thus providing maximum benefit and continued funding for your SOA transformation."

--Maja Tibbling, Lead Enterprise Architect, Con-way Enterprise Services

"Succeeding with SOA achieves where most books on service-oriented architectures fail. It accurately describes what practitioners are seeing, as well as why, and gives them practical examples through case studies and instruction. Most useful both for those about to take the plunge and those who are already soaking."

--Charly Paelinck, Vice President, Development and Architecture, Harrah's Entertainment

"This book is a must-read for architects and SOA practitioners. It provides an important foundation for a SOA strategy. Brown emphasizes the importance of aligning services with their business processes, building capabilities using strong enterprise architecture standards, and ensuring an effective governance process. The book promotes the notion of mutual dependency between managing a business using business processes and managing its IT with SOA. By aligning the two paradigms, a business can become more agile, able to adapt to change both quickly and economically. This is the promise of SOA."

--Sunny Tara, Director, IT, Enterprise Architecture and Services, Harrah's Entertainment

Today, business processes and information systems are so tightly intertwined that they must be designed together, as parts of a total architecture, to realize enterprise goals. In Succeeding with SOA, Paul Brown shows how service-oriented architectures (SOAs) provide the best structure for such integration: clean, well-defined interfaces between collaborating entities. But even SOAs need to be correctly understood and implemented to avoid common failures. Drawing on decades of experience, Dr. Brown explains what business managers and IT architects absolutely need to know--including critical success factors--to undertake this essential work.

Coverage includes

• Setting clear and reasonable expectations for SOA's benefits
• Understanding why conventional project management techniques don't scale to today's enterprise-wide projects
• Defining a living roadmap for developing services based on business priorities
• Establishing coherent leadership that brings together business executives, IT leaders, and the SOA architecture group
• Using Total Architecture Synthesis (TAS) to rapidly develop business processes and information systems together
• Understanding the central role of architecture--and making sure the right architectural decisions get made

Whether you're a business or technical leader, this book will help you plan, organize, and execute SOA initiatives that meet or exceed their goals--now, and for years to come.

Paul C. Brown is Principal Software Architect at TIBCO, a world leader in enterprise software and services (www.tibco.com). His model-based tool architectures underlie applications ranging from process control interfaces to NASA satellite mission planning. Dr. Brown's extensive design work on enterprise-scale information systems led him to develop the total architecture concept. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.